ConChord: Sunday (and a bit of Friday)

[mdlbear]

Before I proceed to yesterday's events, I'd like to go back to Friday afternoon, when I went up to the front desk to ask somebody why my room Wi-Fi didn't work in the lobby. It turned out that they're on different networks, and for some unguessable reason (probably having a lot to do with greed trumping good customer relations) you have to pay separately for them. Foo.

The amusing thing, though, was the Russian desk clerk's name: Alexander Savitzky. (OK, I don't know how it's transliterated; I'm sure it would be the same in Cyrilics, though ours came through Polish and so would have been transliterated back in my great-grandparents' time, if not earlier.) In case you don't know, that's also my nephew's name. (Waves to asavitzk.)

OK: back to Sunday. Caught Kathy Mar's concert -- unfortunately very thinly attended. The whole con was very thinly attended, in fact, but that's another matter. Missed most of the two-shots getting ready for the Callie and Steve Hour. We ran through "Staying Home Tonight" in the dealer's room for Joe Bethancourt, who had to leave to catch a plane at 3:00. Caught the very tail end of Lorien Patton's set -- must hear more of her -- and proceeded to set up my mics in the back of the room.

The concert went pretty well, I think. (Some people have said it went very well, but there were at least one major trainwreck and a couple of minor ones. It was basically the Callie (cflute) and Steve show, with tibicina on vocals for Callie's material, and me on guitar for some of it.

Set list: ConChord-2007

1. High Barratry
2. Guilty Pleasures
3. The Owl and the Pussycat
4. Lullaby for a Friend I've Never Met (tibicina) -- me on guitar.
5. Staying Home Tonight (pocketnaomi / almeda) -- me on guitar
6. Lost my Melody (cflute & tibicina / vixyish)
7. Cicero in the 21st Century
8. Keep the Dream Alive
9. The Rambling Silver Rose
10. The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of
11. Ship of Stone
12. The World Inside the Crystal
13. Axe of Destruction (madfilkentist (IIRC) / catsittingstill

(Aside: let me know in comments how you want to be credited on this and future set lists: I'm totally public about the connection between my LJ name and my RL name, in part because I've been using both for so long that there's not way to conceal the connection. But I know some people don't want them both used in the same place. I suspect it's an exercise in futility in these days of Google and social networking, but I'll respect your wishes in this matter, whatever they may be.)

As I mentioned, there were trainwrecks. The worst was the last chords of "Guilty Pleasures" -- if I get distracted or flustered that can go off the rails completely, and it did. More minor ones happened in the instrumental breaks of "World Inside the Crystal" and "Ship of Stone" -- if I just leave my fingers on autopilot and go with the melody I'm usually fine, but if I start listening to myself and thinking about what I'm doing I'm often doomed. Either I didn't go far enough off for cflute to notice, or she covered for me amazingly well; I'm not sure which. There were a couple of vocal glitches, too, but not enough to matter.

Callie also took over the patter when it became obvious that I was going to be spending much of my time on the breaks clearing my throat. She's better at it, anyway.

Dinner was Chinese, this time across the street in P.F. Chang's with the Ronnie and Arthur Rubin. Tasty, if more upscale/pretentious than authentic. I'd originally planned to follow the flower_cat down to dinner, but ended up in a long conversation, mostly about home recording and CD production.

The dead dog started decomposing shortly before midnight, since many people had to catch flights at ridiculous hours in the morning. Still, it was a nice little circle. I need to keep better track of my singing, but it included "Daddy's World" (when the Y.D. dropped in for a hug), "Demon Lover" (after a sequence of love songs took a slightly weird twist), and a couple of others.

Comments

[tibicina.livejournal.com]

Lullabye is actually all mine. (well, except the harmony cflute was doing which is hers.)

Lost My Melody the lyrics are by cflute and myself.

another point of order

[callibr8]

At least on my screen, items 4 and 5 run together. And there's a misspelling on 4, Lullabye is missing its 'Y'. (Y? I dunno...)

I couldn't sing very much all weekend. If by doing patter I was able to give you time to clear your throat a bit and keep going, then great! Always glad to do it. Need to get better about song attributions, though. I'll work on that.

[callibr8]

FYI on the wireless... I used the Boingo account I had established a while back when flying through DTW (hmm, must've been for FilKONtario), and was charged "only" $7.95 for the 24 hours (noon to noon) of Internet access that I got at the con. Which is less than the hotel's standard rate, at least.

[mdlbear]

Corrected. Many thanks. You didn't have an attribution on the lyrics.

I had a lot of fun performing with you and Callie -- we'll have to do that more often.

[mdlbear]

I think I'll sign up with them before my next trip; I'm pretty sure they have a monthly rate, which would easily pay for itself over the course of a couple of cons.

Re: another point of order

[mdlbear]

Actually, what "lullaby" has is a place where I attempted to remove an extraneous final "e" and blew my spell-check roll.

The problem between 4 and 5 might be something odd with the browser or an artifact of the screen size; there is a [br] tag there. I removed a linebreak, but since I have those all over the place and I don't have autoformatting turned on, it shouldn't matter.

You also seem to be a lot smoother with the patter than I am. I've always had a little trouble composing complete sentences on the fly.

Re: another point of order

[callibr8]

Today the set list is linear and not flowed across items 4 and 5. Go figure. Hmm, I wonder if it was a transient LJ glitch? I got a few of those last night.

As for patter, for me it's part free-association and part improv. Since I'm quite comfortable with both of those, I'm happy to "step up" and provide that for our sets. I'll want to consult with you on certain things like High Barratry, but between the notes you've provided on your songs' pages, and what I know about my (or EC) repertoire, I can probably mostly "wing it" and still do okay.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

I am fine with my LJ handle and my RL name being used interchangeably as circumstances warrant.

[mdlbear]

Hmm; the monthly rate is $22, so I think I'll go with the daily rate after all.

[mdlbear]

Thanks. That will make things simpler in the future, though I think I'll leave it as is for now.

Re: another point of order

[mdlbear]

Thanks. I'm getting better, but improv has never been one of my strong points.

You're probably right that the formatting problem was an LJ glitch. Weird, though -- I'm not sure I could figure out what kind of bug would cause that behavior.